Note the utterly blithe dismissal of the million odd Vietnamese forced to flee for their lives (because of..... what?) and the over two million Cambodians slaughtered in the aftermath.

We stopped a war! Yay us! Aren't we just the most wonderful people EVER?? Let's do it again, waddya say....

Objective is the most important of the principle of war. The objective in Vietnam was to disprove the inevitability of Communization. That objective was not achieved, not then, anyway.

What is the objective in Iraq? If it is what we say it is, "a free, independent, united and democratic Iraq," we are no more likely to succeed there. But if the true objective is to demonstrate the failure of the spiritual jailhouse, so as to convict them, inmates and jailors all, of their cultural incompetence, we are succeeding brilliantly.

The object was the same in both places: giving the citizenry the option of consensual government. We failed in Vietnam, succeeded in Iraq.

"Giving the citizenry the option of consensual government,"--that sounds like something Chimpy is saying, only he doesn't take it seriously.

That's not an objective, it's an act of well-wishing. Serious statesmen to not commit their nation's "blood and treasure," as the saying goes, to pious posturing. Especially when the final outcome would turn not on our will, but on demented foreigners drawing to an inside straight.

Imagine an historian of a hundred years hence writing about what national objectives may have been for this or that policy. Of course McKinley, Wilson, FDR, Truman, and Reagan. to give a few examples, presented pious, humanitarian postures. Their policies, however were hard as Krupp steel. Our opponents in those days were the dreamers.

The Republic doesn't produce "serious statesmen." Such Realists are unelectable. It produces Crusaders ands every one of them has pursued the same objective, the one spelled out in the Declaration:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

They're just doing their duty.

"Blood and Steel"? Mr. Gots, this "war" has not cost us blood or steel. We lost more men in peacetime, and the money we have spent is repaid tenfold in the security needed for our trading empire. Why not gamble?
As to your second point, everyone in politics is a dreamer. America has been able to build castles in the sky because our feet are planted firmly on the ground.

Robert: I strongly agree that our casulties in Iraq, for all that each is an individual tragwdy and a heroic sacrifice, are historically trivial. Putting things in quotatiion marks means that the word or phrase is not accepted as a rectified name.

Part of the way Pan Bog looks out for drunks, children and the United States of America is to gift us with coldly rational, objective-focused foreign policy. Throw Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and James Knox Polk, the greatest before George W. Bush, into that list of lords of statecraft.

Lou, you are a national treasure.

Posted by: erp at June 28, 2007 6:35 AM